The median duration of unemployment for unemployed people was 17 weeks in July 2013, according to an Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) report released today.

ABS Director of Labour Force and Supplementary Surveys, Stephen Collett, said the Job Search Experience Survey collected information on the experiences of people seeking work such as steps taken to find work and the difficulties encountered in finding work. The survey collected information from unemployed people, employed people who started their current job in the previous 12 months and people employed for more than a year in their job who had looked for work in the last year.

Mr Collett said, "The median duration of unemployment rose from 14 weeks in July 2012 to 17 weeks in July 2013. The median duration of unemployment was 18 weeks for men and 15 weeks for women in July 2013."

"The most common difficulty in finding work for the unemployed was too many applicants for available jobs (17 per cent) and no vacancies in line of work (9 per cent), while 10 per cent reported that they had no difficulties in finding work".

"Around 1.7 million people had started their current job in the last 12 months to July 2013. Nearly a quarter of these people (20 per cent) searched for less than a month before starting their job while 34 per cent did not look for work. Only five per cent who had started a job had looked for work for one year or more. Of those people who had started a job in the last 12 months, 10 per cent had started their own business", Mr Collett said.